It’s Sunday morning in Hollywood, and the experts have declared the winners and losers of the weekend box office, for which the celebrity contenders were Jim Carrey in Disney’s A Christmas Carol, George Clooney in The Men Who Stare at Goats and Cameron Diaz in The Box. Headline in The Wrap: “$31M Lump of Coal for ‘Christmas Carol’.” And from Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood: “Happy Holidays? Not for Stars: Carrey, Clooney, & Cameron Open Soft This Weekend.” Meanwhile, Variety trumpeted that “‘Precious’ finds special place at box office.”

The raw numbers — the studios’ early tallies of the weekend gross, based on hard numbers for Friday, estimates for Saturday and sheer guesswork for Sunday — say that Christmas Carol won the weekend with $31 million, more than double the $14 million take of the runner-up, and last week’s winner, Michael Jackson’s This Is It. The very odd Clooney comedy came in third, with $13.3 million, just beating out the $12.9 million gleaned by the low-budget alien-abduction thriller The Fourth Kind. Trailing these were the unkillable phenomenon of Paranormal Activity, with $8.6 million in its seventh week, and Diaz’s The Box, limping into sixth place with $7.9 million. Finally, playing at just 18 theaters, the heralded drama Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ By Sapphire amassed an impressive $1.8 million — the same amount that Hilary Swank’s Amelia earned on more than 1,000 screens.

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